Speaker for the Diodes

Nov. 19th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"Those who go through the court process are by no means
guaranteed the desired outcome. Judges have broad discretion to
deny name and gender marker changes, and it's not uncommon for
them to do so. The Utah Supreme Court heard arguments this year
from attorneys representing two transgender people who were not
allowed to change their gender on official documents.

"'It's a very frustrating, disjointed legal system right
now for gender marker changes,' said Arli Christian, the state
policy director for the National Center for Transgender Equality,
or NCTE.

[...]

"According to Christian,
judges more frequently deny requests to change genders on IDs
than names.

"'This is not a process that should be
in the courts,' Christian said. 'Judges are not experts in gender
identity.'"

Nov. 18th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"Ever wonder why the LGB and the T are smashed together?
Because before those identities existed [read: called into being
though discourse], we were basically all just 'inverts". Science
labeled us All as having an 'inverted' gender. Being attracted
to the same sex was long considered a fault of [gender]. It was a
long time before sexuality was pulled away from gender and what
we now think of as cisgender/cissexual gays, lesbians, and
bisexuals were allowed to *just* be gay.

"So, just
fuck off with your ahistorical 'before we let the T join us'
nonsense. There was never a time when LGB was separate. We were
always here."

Nov. 17th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"It's amazing how transphobes really think trans women need
to give up our aesthetics, our interests, our fetishes, in the
name of some nebulous Greater Gender Good. Folks, you get one
life. You don't need to box yourself in for someone else's
ideology. Enjoy yourself." -- Zinnia Jones,
2017-11-28

"I've presented in just about every variation of femme,
butch, high, low, and so on over the years, and at absolutely
every point, transphobes were calling me a 'caricature' and
'stereotype'. Face it: transphobes just hate women" --
Zinnia Jones,
2017-12-06

Nov. 16th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"If the trans community, allies and LGBTQ organizations
reserve one day a year to light candles for the dead, it's vital
to spend the other days fighting for the living. Otherwise,
Transgender Day of Remembrance functions not as a true memorial
for the fallen, but merely a way to comfort those who want to end
transgender violence but are not inclined to take the difficult
steps to eradicate it." -- Meredith Talusan,
"On Trans Day of Remembrance, we must do much more than
remember", 2015-11-19

[Transgender Day of Remembrance is this coming Tuesday.]

[Huge thanks to all my friends -- and everyone else -- in MA
who pushed hard on Question 3 to keep the state's protections
for rights of trans people in effect! And to everyone who stands
up and raises their voice to counter poisonous anti-trans
speech when they hear it, and to every cis person willing to
accompany a trans person to a public restroom to help keep them
safe!]

Nov. 14th, 2018

05:26 am - QotD

"Lynn began to think that her story might help somehow.
Societal views are partly a media problem. Images of
transsexualism routinely come from stories of 'transition'.
That's a time when media can focus on prurient, somewhat shocking
and often embarrassing aspects of someone's gender change. The
stories seem superficially sympathetic, but often convey a sad,
dreary image. Readers are left feeling sorry for the 'poor
things', and 'certainly wouldn't want it to happen in their
family'!

"What doesn't come through is the miracle
of release from entrapment in a male body that the transsexual
girl experiences, and the happiness she finds as a woman later
on. Folks never learn about the tens of thousands of
post-operative women living among us who are very successful and
fully accepted as regular gals. The public simply never sees
these successes."

Nov. 13th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"If order is prioritized over justice, or if order is
mistaken for justice, you will eventually begin to hear all sorts
of propositions that might otherwise seem shocking, that end,
either implicitly or explicitly, with, 'and that's why a lot of
people will have to die.'

"You wouldn't hear people
express these propositions out loud in blunt terms -- not at
first, anyway. You'd have to watch the society for actions taken
and statements made, to see what the logical assumptions behind
such actions and statements must be."

Nov. 12th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"One very important but dismal lesson 2017-18 have taught
us is that when white supremacists, neo-Nazis, or other far right
types decide to get violent, you absolutely cannot rely on the
police to protect you. The police will stand by and watch. If you
haven't noticed this pattern, pay more attention to who ends up
getting arrested when skinheads decide they want to attack
someone." -- Ed, "It Can Happen Here," Gin and Tacos
[thanks to
realinterrobang, for
quoting this earlier]

Nov. 11th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"Now the sun shines down on the green fields of France
a warm summer wind makes the red poppys dance
The trenches have vanished under the plows,
there's no gas no barbed wire, there's no guns firing now
but here in this graveyard it's still No Man's land,
the countless white crosses stand mute in the sand
for man's blind indifference to his fellow man,
to a whole generation that was butchered and damned"
-- from
"No Man's Land" (aka "The Green Fields of France", aka "Willie
McBride"), by
Eric Bogle

Nov. 9th, 2018

08:51 pm - QotD

05:24 am - QotD

"There are a lot of white people who think the solution to
'racial tensions' is black people knowing their place. Black
people having power makes them tense, and they call that 'racial
tension.'" -- -- Steven (@StevenMartens23),
2018-11-08

05:26 am - QotD

Nov. 7th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"There's a certain kind of person who can't bear there not
being symmetry in the world, and if it isn't obviously there,
they move their own little Overton-window or imagine up fantasies
in order to equivocate. If there were no antifa, they'd just
assume the peaceful anti-Nazi protesters we just as bad as the
Nazis, or that the Nazis weren't so bad, because otherwise the
necessary symmetry they assume is there would be untenable.
Basically, these idiots, and they are legion, would either assume
the worst about the good guys are the best about the bad guys
just to keep from having to realize the world isn't a perfectly
balanced place."
-- Roving Youth Pastor, Alicublog, comments
[thanks to realinterrobang for
quoting this earlier]

Nov. 6th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"A scale of privilege dictates which emotions we are obligated to take
seriously. I'm reminded of the many admonitions to try to understand why white
working class men might be angry -- from people who remained at best
indifferent to the anger of marginalized groups, mocking Black Lives Matter,
demonizing angry women as 'feminazis.' Some Anger Matters. Some Anger Doesn't.
Bourgeois respectability privileges the anger of those who are already in
power, while that of those who are disenfranchised is viewed as disruptive,
distasteful. It makes people uncomfortable, so it should go away. Happily,
there will always be a cute puppy meme we can hide behind, so we won't have to
see it.

"This is why authoritarian institutions are so frightened
of 'difficult' art that uncovers injustice and abuse. [...]"

Nov. 5th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"According to a recent report in the New York Times,
the Department of Health and Human Services is 'considering
narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition
determined by genitalia at birth.' While the department's memo
purports to be 'grounded in science,' the arguments and
conclusions are not. Specifically, the memo argues that sex
should be determined by--at different points in the purported
memo--birth certificates, genitals and genetics. The problem with
this argument is that none of these markers of sex is 'definitive
proof of a person's sex' and in fact, nothing is. In reality, the
course of becoming a 'male' or 'female' involves several steps,
regulated by many genes and hormones.

"Much of the
time these processes all go in the same direction. But some of
the time, they don't. Seeing how that happens makes clear that
the proposal, to define all people as male or female at birth, is
scientifically dubious."

[If you vote for Republicans, you are not voting for people
who don't care about me; you are voting for people who want
to harm me. I really hope that your sense of "people you
personally know and like" matters more than your sense of
"political tribe".]

Nov. 4th, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

"I'd love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I'd love to
know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full
of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never
imagined how hungry I'd be one day to look inside it." --
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

Nov. 3rd, 2018

05:24 am - QotD

Nov. 2nd, 2018

05:26 am - QotD

Rabbi Alana Suskin posted on Facebook (on
2018-10-27) some very important things to keep in mind, a
large chunk of which I am quoting here even though I suspect much
of this is already obvious to many of my friends.

[...]

There are those who hate the immigrants coming into the
country and use the language of invasion and overrun.

Those people who were murdered today, they were the
descendants - like everyone not Native American in this country,
except for African Americans who came against their will in
chains - of immigrants who fled from poverty or oppression. They
- and thus all of us - were "invaders" in exactly the same
way.

If you claim you are not an anti-Semite, but
you use this kind of language, stop, immediately, because the
language of traitors and invaders, this is what it leads
to.

If you claim you're not racist, stop using this
language. It is not about "doing it right" or laws or jobs. It is
about decency.

[...]

Today our Torah reading
included the portion about Sodom's destruction.

The
sin of Sodom was actually made very clear by the prophets and the
sages: it wasn't sexual in nature, but rather a moral failure to
share in the resources of the land.

It was
treating the stranger as an invader, hoarding the riches of the
land to only those who were "natives."